![]() ![]() ![]() Sjöwall and Wahlöö created Martin Beck, the central character in a series that established many of the conventions of the genre. I suggest that any Johnny-come-lately who first encountered great Scandinavian thrillers with Stieg Larsson’s best-selling Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series should immediately drop everything and dip into these earlier authors. They were followed two decades later by Henning Mankell, a politically fierce Stockholm novelist active around the turn of the millennium. In my mind the genre truly kicks off with a husband-and-wife team of best-selling Swedish authors, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who wrote in the 1960’s and 70’s. Dagmar Lange, who began writing in the late 1940’s under the pen-name of Maria Lang, employed a sultry female narrator to break open taboo themes, including lesbianism, and set her books in the fictional Swedish village of Skoga.īut for me, the choice of major Nordic Noir pioneers is clear. Raffles-like gentleman-criminal named Philip Collin.Ī little later on, Stig Trenter wrote numerous Stockholm-based novels from the mid-1940’s to the 1960’s, featuring a photographer hero and a more hapless police detective. Also influenced by British crime writing, Gunnar Serner, using the pseudonym Frank Heller, created an A.J. Other early candidates include a number of slavish Sherlock Holmes imitators in the early part of the last century, including the team of S.A. The pedants among us might mention Frederick Lindholm’s The Stockholm Detective ( Stockholmsdetekiven ), published in 1893 and not much read today, but touted as the first Scandinavian detective novel. ![]() Talking about the best classic noir novels, the best Scandinavian mystery books, or the best Swedish thriller series, every person will naturally have a different take on which authors are important and how the genre began. Written by Gil Reavill, co-author, This Land is no Stranger BEGINNINGS OF NORDIC NOIR: MARTIN AND KURTĪny subject worth examining has many ways in, and Nordic Noir is no different. This Land is no Stranger is following in those very impressive footsteps and author Gil Reavill has explores the influences of the genre and the impact they have had on literature, and his own writing. The proliferation of Nordic Noir in the last two decades was made possible by earlier Scandinavian authors who paved the way with bold and challenging stories set against the everyday realities of life, death, and everything in between. ![]()
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